Learning by Giving
BY MID-MAY Brazil was being ravaged by a brutal epidemic. COVID-19, which had already infected some 8% of the population, was beginning to swarm through the teeming cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. But it was a different scourge—a bone-crushing disease called dengue—that had already sickened nearly 700,000 Brazilians this year. In the state of Mato Grosso do Sul (in Portuguese, the name means “Thick Bushes of the South”), a local newspaper reported a spate of recent dengue cases. Five thousand miles away, in Boston, a machine-learning program plucked the news from an Internet site, mined the text (in Portuguese) for keywords suggesting an outbreak, and posted an “alert” on HealthMap—an online global disease warning system developed by epidemiologists at Boston Children’s Hospital. On any given day, the global map on…